BMP HQ

Welcome to the official page of BOBGOBLIN, a band whose current line-up has been together since 1994, building on a concept that started in 1992. After some creative diversions over the years, including a period in which we released a couple of records under the name AOJ (Adventures of Jet), the group is more committed than ever to bringing our many musical, visual, and conceptual ideas to light, even as the twilight begins to sprint with us in our race to the finish while the noise of digital shit tries to drown us out. Join us on this and other sites as we continue to release new songs, unveil new videos, and discuss the issues and inspirations that help feed our rock n' roll rants. Make sure to sign up for our mailing list or follow us if you'd like to be notified when new songs and videos are released and when new shows are announced. In our world, you that enjoy the BOB's rock are the Black Market Party, the boldest and most independent-spirited rock n' roll fans on Earth. Stay tuned to this BMP channel and we will continue to lead the march of the party as we have done for the long haul. Let's Rock!

When this song came out, one could follow a number of known acts that were much more overtly subversive and provocative than these girls from LA. In my own early attempts to reach for stuff that my peers ignored, no matter the musical genre or style, I didn't give them much of my time then, even though their presence couldn't be easily escaped. However, when you consider the very unfortunate and shocking happenstance that there would not TO THIS DAY be another all-female band - who wrote their own stuff - to chart and resonate like the Go Gos did, they almost become subversive and provocative by default as a band who broke through a gender barrier and likely inspired a large section of the young female population who may have had yet to find a seemingly more profound feminist inspiration. Of course, even though I consider myself in no position to comment on how female acts develop or how they should, or by what young females should be inspired, I by no means fault women for the fact that all-female-band successes on that level are not ever-present. I naturally fault the different forms of corporate marginalization, as I do with most issues. But I digress. Though their videos featured them in colorful, inoffensive clothing and smiling faces, and though they lacked the indie cool factor of bands like their overtly subversive contemporaries The Slits or more recent all-female acts like Sleater-Kinney, there is enough raw and unabashed energy to those early recordings, with their mix of surf, mod-rock and what I would call "pre-emo," that to ignore the cool factor of BEAUTY AND THE BEAT and parts of VACATION is, in my opinion, to be blinded by the commercialization that occurred as soon as it was learned that they might be something special. If nothing else, from a song-writing standpoint, the Go Gos best songs are - if there were an objective measure for a great song - about as good as they get. I mean, "Our Lips Are Sealed," We Got the Beat," "Head Over Heels," and "Vacation"....that's a significant amount of undeniably hooky and superbly constructed songs that were not only huge hits, they were important as cultural statements. Factoring in production, the potential angles of lyrical interpretation, cultural importance, song structure, and melodic hook, I would put "Our Lips are Sealed" on my list of the Top 20 American Pop-Rock songs (Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime" is and will always be No.1, and the Beach Boys could possibly sit on about 30% of the list). I suppose it seems, at this point, that I'm just some Go Gos fanboy that can't stand not to express his love for them and try to convince would-be readers of their coolness. Uh...not really. Admittedly I've only listened to their two seminal records a handful of times, whereas I've listened to the Breeders LAST SPLASH album, for example, like 1200 times, and I'd much rather listen to Kleenex or The Slits if I'm just passing time. However, I just heard this song again recently, and it dawned on me that there may be an under-appreciation of their significance by whatever pop-culture intelligentsia there may be (and if there is such a thing...fuck them anyway) and that perhaps beneath the veil of American wholesomeness and commercial-acceptability lies an unacknowledged yet inherent subversiveness. I'm sure some Sontag-ian essayist has put it all together in a more intelligent way, so let's just set that very long-winded introduction aside, and say that if "Our Lips are Sealed" were on top of the charts today, it would perhaps be seen as a most poignant indictment of our current, troll-ridden, social-media-centric, news-as-propaganda culture....or it could a be the co-opted themesong for the corporations that make up the American military industrial complex.

I guess the Earth is not necessarily dropping huge turds more than it always has, we just get to watch it drop the turds more often now, AND we get to see what the turds actually look like! Todays turd? It's this random-ass person from Dallas, unfortunately, who enjoys her role as a business owner/CEO, but doesn't think women have the right gender-makeup for the presidency. We wouldn't give her the satisfaction of bringing her up (in fact, let's borrow Karl Rove's nickname and call her Turd Blossom in place of her real name), except her zig-zaggy position on the matter sounded EXACTLY like the response that supporting politicians were throwing around recently in regards to the Freedom of Religion bills. Their reasoning was pretty much this: "I'm not saying people shouldn't be free to be what they are and live their lives, I'm just saying that we should have the right to deny their freedom so that ours can be preserved. But I am in no way saying they shouldn't have their rights, I'm just saying that we need to preserve ours....it's just that the only way to do that is by limiting theirs." Almost as if she picked up on that meme, Blossom justified her stance: "By no means am I saying every woman out there who doesn't do what I do is a bad female, or that your daughter shouldn't aspire to be the president. If that's what she wants, that's great, go for it. All it means is that I don't support that, that's my personal opinion." We have to give her props for taking note of the talking points that were thrown around a few weeks ago on a different subject and reworking them here when the need is to backtrack. Clevah, Sis! Clevah, clevah! I suppose we also have to give Today's Turd mad props for somehow being more relevant than all the other Hoosiers that say random crap on Facebook. We've been saying random crap and backing it up with a killer soundtrack for years, but apparently if random crap has a great hook, it's not the kind of random crap that deserves relevancy. Oh, Blossom is also going to move to Canada if Clinton becomes president. Please do, Blossom! I recommend a secluded area in the Northwest Territories, as you probably won't have much use for the places in Canada where there are people, considering that those people made Canada the first place outside of Europe to legalize same-sex marriage. They also maintain a position of legal abortion, pot-smoking, and a way more Obamacare-y version of Obamacare! We've saved you the research, Turd....you might prefer staying in Texas even under the presidency of a woman. As a side note - we do not condone a Hillary Clinton presidency ourselves, but would love to see another woman be president. Fortunately or unfortunately, she has too much sense for it.

Usable water is running out for many people right now, and it might possibly do so for everyone at some point. We have so many nuclear weapons that one minor human error could do anything from kill a million people to obliterate the entire inhabited Earth, and yet the US will increase its spending on its nuclear capabilities, favoring that over funding health, education, infrastructure, and so many other needed things. Pollution worldwide is not becoming any less of a problem as time goes on, and air pollution has been blamed for millions of deaths per year. Cell phones - of which we have billions - could at worse cause brain cancer and at best mutate the natural order of otherwise normal brain patterns. Improper usage and allocation of energy resources is resulting in a variety of dire circumstances. One could go on forever about TODAY's problems, and by TODAY's problems, I mean problems that are unique to THIS day. Yes, overpopulation in a given space was perhaps a problem in, say, the 15th century, but how to divide up the space on the entire Earth among SEVEN BILLION people is a problem of today. With so many problems that are unique to today, HOW IN THE FUCK are we wasting time with problems that should have been put in the garbage and incinerated thousands of years ago? Once homosapiens reached a certain level in our ability to reason, an awareness of current and real problems in any given era should have rendered certain concerns extinct. But some apes just can't help to rehash these things every year, every month, and every day. We still, after eons of informational development, have to deal with assholes that want every group that they consider an "other" to get in their rightful place and refrain from traveling outside of it. I have an idea. Why don't these assholes (and I'm talking primarily about people who defiantly take their cues from what they think is a religious manifest destiny), get the fuck in THEIR rightful place and stay there (i.e., completely out of sight), allowing the sane people (people who do not base their actions on strangely power-inducing fairy-tales) to move about freely without interaction with the likes of them? This would finally allow the sane people the space to deal with ACTUAL problems. The fact that we still deal with issues that plagued humans when humanity was in its infancy (i.e., when humans actually looked like monkeys and were not just monkeys dressed in modern human suits), when a primate from outside the tribe would unknowingly saunter into a hostile environment, is mind-numbing to humans that dare to dream that we can progress as a specie. The fact that we still deal with fear of homosexuality, skin color, cultural differences, differences in belief, and SCIENCE, is not only bewildering and exasperating, but it also hinders reasonable humans from dealing with REAL problems that we actually need to deal with. Helping to proliferate the ignorance, members of government at every level in every corner of the nation are not only direct representatives of the assholes that roam the land worrying about dumber things than their primate ancestors did, they could actually be the dumbest of the lot. Indeed, government officials, law enforcement agents, and people who want to be law enforcement agents seem to form a petri dish of the most concentrated form of STEWPID and disgusting that we could come up with. Therefore, since over the course of thousands of years we cannot get past the concerns of animals, and since we cannot understand how to focus on real and current problems, then the resulting effect is regression. We are not only going nowhere, we are easily going backwards. Why all this on the band blog? Perhaps there is a relation. When we started out in the early-mid-90s, we spent some time trying to deflect accusations that we were just trying to be like DEVO with our flashy black jumpsuits. We would not deny them as an influence, but they were no more of one than tons of other 70s/80s bands, and they were much less of an influence on our aesthetic (or schtick, as some would say) than the satirically militaristic anarcho-punk of the 70s - we simply added some science fiction and took it from there. Nonetheless, starting in the early 90s, at a time when flannel and grunge were the thing and flashy black jumpsuits were definitely not, we would have to listen to the heckles as we approached the stage..."Nice suits, Devo!" This was, by the way, also a time when drunk lunkheads at a club might use a derogatory tone when calling you "Devo." Earlier and later, it might be a compliment. Anyway...knowing it was pointless to retort, we might have thought to ourselves, "No...we are not Devo." But now, after the non-stop barrage of idiocy I've witnessed in my time on Earth so far, knowing now that it will not change, I realize we were wrong. We are indeed Devo. Everyone on earth is Devo. We are going backwards. Fast. And unfortunately for the ones I love, it sometimes feels like it's almost over.

This video, created for reasons I do not currently know, is pretty damn sweet on a number of levels relating to our band history, with none of them really having anything to do with our deer-eyed, mandatory viewings of this show in the early stages of fatherhood. Rather...besides the fact that it's set to Joy Division, which would be worthy enough on its own....it reminds me personally of when we would play a Dallas club in the mid-late 90s, and then afterwards convene at Tony's crib near Fair Park to decompress; we would turn on the tube at like 2:30-3am and this show would be one of the few things on (Tony did not have cable). We would just sit and stare at the screen and wonder what in the absolute fuck was going on. It was clear that The Teletubbies was obviously an extremely viable option for late-night candy flippers who did not have a laser show or a rave handy. To add to the nostalgia....soon after we had made ourselves aware of this crazy-ass show, conservatives, just like they do in almost every circumstance today, brought this show up and regarded it as some sort of ploy to recruit toddlers into the fold of homosexuality. Ummm....yeah, whatever. That wrinkle naturally made the show way cooler than it probably would have otherwise been, transforming a benign attempt by BBC producers to occupy a child's brain with comforting scenes for a small portion of the day into a significant work of art by virtue of involuntary activism. Lastly, the shitty quality of this edit reminds me of of some of the weird cable access programs of the late 80s and 90s - not necessarily a good thing, but certainly of a time, as shitty-looking cable access productions of the 90s had their own vibe compared to the usual shitty-looking YouTube videos of today. I'm sure many would disagree, but from my POV....there is much more to this vid than the sum of its parts:

Once again one of our songs, which are often fictional constructs based on our world view, is proven correct from the source. In this case, it's "Hide from Tomorrow" from Love Lost For Blood Lust. I'm not saying that we're always the first to call this shit, but we think about this kind of stuff A LOT, especially because we like to write songs about it, and we definitely try to stay on the forefront. Of course, you have to understand that with our budget, it often takes years to actually get these songs recorded, so we can never prove it when we called it first ;P.Escape for the 1%

In addition to being available on this site and on Bandcamp, which it has been for a couple of weeks, the special advance "Virtual 45" of Sinistar / Robotron is also now available via iTunes, AmazonMp3, Spotify and many other services. Rock it, and If you like it, please drop a review to help the uninitiated.